Populations Of Social Networks Versus Countries

Popular social networks can get pretty huge. Just how huge? Facebook, decidedly the largest in the world, sits just over 1.5 billion, more than the population of China. New users jump on every day from all over the world, leading to the opportunity for some pretty phenomenal growth. Each quarter, usually during their earnings calls, each of the big social networks will normally take the opportunity to reveal just how much they’ve managed to grow during that quarter, as well as their total new numbers. The numbers can get pretty staggering, so in order to provide a good visual, Business Insider has taken the liberty of making an infographic in the form of a chart to compare a few of the top social networks out there to the populations of a few countries.

After Facebook edges out the entire population of China, Yahoo and Facebook-owned WhatsApp tie up the 1 billion spot, followed by QQ at 860 million. Facebook’s own Messenger platform posts a fairly impressive 800 million figure, no doubt bolstered by emerging markets. WeChat manages to nab the next spot down at 650 million. From there, LinkedIn and another Facebook number, Instagram, tie for 400 million, just overcoming the entire population of the United States at 321 million, who in turn beats the population of Twitter by a mere one million. Snapchat and Sina Weibo sit at the bottom of the big social media heap at 200 million a pop, beating out the populations of Pakistan and Nigeria.

Those numbers, easily visualized in the chart provided, paint quite a picture of the current world communication landscape. The opportunity to communicate to a huge audience across diverse locations is more real than ever and has led to some incredible happenings. While some of these services may fluctuate from time to time in user count, the total number of social media users is bound to only go up as the years go on and the involved technology becomes more and more ubiquitous. Projects like Facebook’s Free Basics and Google’s Project Loon, in their early stages at the moment, are likely to play an integral role in the worldwide expansion of social media and the internet.